Tea at Trianon: A War Photographer

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, June 1, 2014

A War Photographer

From The Guardian:

A good war photographer will photograph war and battles, but the best comprehend that war is fought around and through civilians, who make up the majority of war casualties these days. So in the images in this book there are the exhausted US soldiers and terrifyingly young boy soldiers of Liberia's wars, blank aggression on their faces. But there is stillness too, in the deep green stagnant pond in an abandoned Iraqi palace, or in a young Liberian woman in a dead faint at a political rally, borne on the shoulders of the crowd, her position one of ecstasy or crucifixion. Hondros wanted to take portraits of people but also countries: full portraits that incorporated the aftermath of war as well as its appalling presence. (Read more.)